Watch theft in Geneva: two Neapolitans before the courts

A whim after having suffered losses in the game. Here is what would have motivated the two Neapolitans tried this Monday at the Criminal Court. On May 3, 2024, they came to Geneva to try to tear a luxury watch on the wrist of a rich victim. “Two or three days before”, they bought a scooter and a motorcycle with false plates. The day before the facts, they had put them in a van led by an accomplice encountered at the Naples station – “where everything is sold and bought,” they say – and had taken a hotel in Annemasse (F).

On May 3 at 5:37 p.m., they had crossed customs in Moillesulaz. At 6 pm, “we saw a Ferrari and a gold bracelet on the driver’s wrist”. Good pick, it is a Patek Philippe, whose value approaches 150,000 francs. They swear that they were not aware of it, attracted by the only brilliance of the bracelet, but little to the fact of the watchmaking subtleties. They try to tear off the watch, the victim resists, they flee. They will still follow, in vain, a Mercedes then a Range Rover, but are already spotted. Shortly before 7 p.m., they will be arrested in the city center after a chase with the police.

This Monday, the two men who weakened of history in Italy and France (still snatching flights) told the difficulty of daily life. “You have fortune, property?” Asked the judge to one of them, 36, addicted to the game. He joins his hands. “We live in Naples …” Combining odd jobs and game debts, he says he met his partner at the exit of a Paris room, rinsed like him. “I had put money aside for the communion of my daughter and I could no longer pay it. He was the same for the rental of his house. ” It was there that the project would have been born to rebuild in Geneva.

Through their questions, the judges obviously try to attach these facts to a more ambitious criminal design, even to a wider organization (Geneva experienced a wave of watches of watches by scooters in scooters, for several months), but the responses of the defendants offer, on this side, no taking (if it is not annoying, that their driver, who had also supplied the motorcycle and the scooter, Meture, had already been convicted in Switzerland for similar facts and has since been arrested in Italy). “But in Naples, for motorcycles and scooters, there are a lot of wooden heads, nominees, like him. I do not know why you focus on him, he is a tramp, he would even sell his mother, ”says the second defendant, a 39 -year -old man surprisingly cultivated given his career, who speaks an excellent French.

Recalling their previous convictions (including ten years for the oldest, who had been in parole for two months when he was pinned in Geneva), the prosecutor Alexia Morel estimated that the defendants were “flight professionals, who know what they are doing and surround themselves with also professional companions.” Deeming them guilty of attempted briganding aggravated in bands and traffic offenses, in particular, she requested three years in prison for each of them and an expulsion from Switzerland for five years.

Defense lawyers, my Bibiane Capela Abd Alla and Florian Roguet, for their part estimated that where the public prosecutor saw professionalism and preparation, he was in reality only amateurism and clumsiness, excluding the idea of ​​the band, which supposes an organization. They also consider that the violence of the two men has not reached the threshold necessary to retain brigandage. They therefore pleaded the attempted theft. The verdict will be returned on Tuesday.

“Champion, it’s hard, hard, hard”